Linux users

User management in Raspbian is done on the command line. The default user is pi, and the password is raspberry. You can add users and change each user's password.

Change your password

Once you're logged in as the pi user, it is highly advisable to use the passwd command to change the default password to improve your Pi's security.

Enter passwd on the command line and press Enter. You'll be prompted to enter your current password to authenticate, and then asked for a new password. Press Enter on completion and you'll be asked to confirm it. Note that no characters will be displayed while entering your password. Once you've correctly confirmed your password, you'll be shown a success message (passwd: password updated successfully), and the new password will apply immediately.

If your user has sudo permissions, you can change another user's password with passwd preceded by the user's username. For example, sudo passwd bob will allow you to set the user bob's password, and then some additional optional values for the user such as their name. Just press Enter to skip each of these options.

Remove a user's password

You can remove the password for the user bob with sudo passwd bob -d.

Create a new user

You can create additional users on your Raspbian installation with the adduser command.

Enter sudo adduser bob and you'll be prompted for a password for the new user bob. Leave this blank if you don't want a password.

Home folder

When you create a new user, they will have a home folder in /home/. The pi user's home folder is at /home/pi/.

skel

Upon creating a new user, the contents of /etc/skel/ will be copied to the new user's home folder. You can add or modify dot-files such as the .bashrc in /etc/skel/ to your requirements, and this version will be applied to new users.

Sudoers

The default pi user on Raspbian is a sudoer. This gives the ability to run commands as root when preceded by sudo, and to switch to the root user with sudo su.

To add a new user to sudoers, type sudo visudo (from a sudoer user) and find the line root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL, under the commented header # User privilege specification. Copy this line and switch from root to the username. To allow passwordless root access, change to NOPASSWD: ALL. The example below gives the user bob passwordless sudo access: